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Comment by CalChris | Hacker News Reader

Identical twin here. In high school, we had a brutal geometry problem set. The only people in the school who got it right were my twin brother and I. Pretty cool.

We were in separate sections; by then, we really didn't like being the same class. I was in the second section and was accused of cheating by the teacher with zero evidence; the correct answers, it was math, were going to be the same. My response was the fuck we did; we were competing against each other. The teacher knew he wasn't going to get past that and changed the subject. But going from only to cheater to next didn't sit well.

As for the article, what is the bitrate of odd movements?

BTW, we may have cheated at one point. 24 Hour Fitness had a less well known half-price for twins membership. Or at least, I think they did.

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My favorite cheat was when my identical twin forgot his id and couldn't get in the bar. I had someone run out my driver's license to him and he got in.

Ahhh... the ole "bar trick." With a good attitude, I've definitely done a 2for1 entry.

A further biometric "hack" :

Many facility doors use a "hand scanner" to secure certain doorways, which combined with your RFID tag "authenticate" the potential entrant.

All that most of these "hand scanners" are doing is very hazily checking finger lengths and hand ratios (i.e. NOT FINGERPRINTS).

So in certain limited access situations my twin and I were able to share certain similar privileges, including a "50% off safe deposit box."

> As for the article, what is the bitrate of odd movements?

This. The claim that they were seated close-by, made odd movements, and progressed at the same rate is very suspicion-inducing. If the test was multiple-choice it really wouldn't have been hard to have one sibling copy the other's answers. Having and resolving disagreements would have required much higher bandwidth, but just playing follow-the-leader would have required a bitrate of, what a few bits a minute?

redacted

The "brother and I" are a compound complement, not an object. Complements use the same form as the subject. Were is a form of "to be" which generally sees subject forms on both sides, such as "It is I".

The only one who got it right was I.

The only ones who got it right were he and I.

I will also add that myself is only for a few specific cases, primarily when the subject and object are the same:

I looked at myself in the mirror. She looked at me.

I have decided to just be myself. Kind of an odd case there.

I, myself, love to go to the movies. Here it is just used for emphasis, not as an actual reflexive pronoun.

Some people do use the reflexive pronoun as an object in certain cases, often with compound objects, but it is not proper under any prescriptive English grammar that I have studied.

> Were is a form of "to be" which generally sees subject forms on both sides, such as "It is I".

I assure you, "it's me" is in far more general use than "it is I". The latter, and the purported rule that copular be takes two subjects, is at best exceptionally formal, and many English-speakers don't readily produce it in any context. Quick litmus test: check how acceptable the equivalent constructions are to you for "us" vs "we" or "them" vs "they": "The only ones who got it right were they."

And then conjunctive compound NPs are clear as mud; you routinely run into otherwise impeccable speech where the governing rule seems to be that local euphony trumps long-range syntactic agreement. There's no good prescription here; there's a pretty wide range of pronoun conjunction constructions where you're going to want to either rephrase or just suck it up and let it sound intuitively wrong to somebody.

I wouldn't correct someone for saying "It's me" in most contexts. But I will step right in and defend the person who says "It is I" and is told she is wrong.

Actually, he was right, and your version is incorrect.

“I was the only one who…”

On the other hand you’d be correct in a phrase like:

“The only people who were cheated were his brother and me.”

The word me is an object of a sentence, not the subject.

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